Dynamic Commentary in Power BI - Excelerator BI

Dynamic Commentary in Power BI

Today is another in my series where I am building out my COVID report for Australia. There are a few things I cover in the video today.  The main “new” concept is the dynamic commentary, but I also show you some more warts and all insider view of building a report.

Continuous Improvement

Firstly I needed to do some touch up work to the report I have been building to date. Over time I have discovered some things that need to change, and some of the look and feel of the report is not quite working for me. This is one of those reality things when you build out reports – what you build the first time around may not be what you actually settle on in the long run. I think it is good to understand this – that beautifully polished reports normally go through a journey from prototype to final quality product.  So I show a couple of things I do to make my report look better.

Dynamic Commentary

The second thing I cover today is how to create dynamic commentary in your reports. This is not something I have used before, so I am glad to be able to share the technique with you in this article.

Video

Download the workbook

A few people have been asking me for the workbook. You are welcome to a copy if you like, but be aware that you wont be able to refresh it because there are quite some source files that would need to be correctly downloaded and configured before the refresh will work.  But, you can still take a look at what I have built in case you are interested.  Just a word of warning, this workbook is a hobby of mine.  I have decided not to invest time going back and fixing some things that probably should be fixed in a production quality report.  Think of it a bit like the taps in the house of a plumber – they always leak, right?

Download the file

5 thoughts on “Dynamic Commentary in Power BI”

  1. Hi Mat,

    Are you updating this report daily? It shows that the last data is of 29/10/2021.

    Thanks for such a great dashboard!

  2. Punlert Nuansirikosol

    Thanks for sharing, Mat. Great tip, I have been wondering what those values in the text box is for as well. This is definitely a good use case for it.

    Would you have the tricks to put the commentary to summarize the Top 3 items as well?
    E.G. Rank 1 of XXX is YY value; Rank 2 of XXX is zz value, etc.

    I can figure out the way to fetch the first and the last rank, but cannot really crack it yet to fetch the value that is rank 2 :-/

    1. My guess is you could build a table using SUMMARIZE that contains the data you need, and then use that as a first parameter inside a CONCATENATEX to produce some text. Alternatively you could just write it out long hand in the text visual and use measures for each of the product names (1, 2, 3) etc.

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